Helpdesk 6.0 SP5 Satisfaction Survey Mod

February 3, 2010

Having run into a few incidents with external users trying to access our helpdesk satisfaction surveys, I decided to stop having the users append the FQDN to the server name and just fix the “cause.” I quote cause here because the true cause of the issue is not that the server name needs the domain name appended to the end of it; the root cause is an older version of the cisco anyconnect VPN client experiencing a split tunnel routing confusion issue.

Rather than seeking out to fix true root cause of the issue (and opening the can of worms that is herding an external sales group) I decided to fix the low hanging fruit. Users did not always need to click a link to respond to helpdesk surveys, they used to be done right in the email and then submitted. When outlook 2007 came out and switched the HTML rendering engine from IE to word and “set email back 10 years,” we were forced to adjust the email template. See the AKB# 35098 for more details.

The template now contains a link so that everything is rendered properly in a browser window. The fix was fairly simple, edit the satisfaction survey, scroll to the bottom, you should see the following text:

This eliminates the split tunnel confusion issue and forces the VPN client to send the http request down the corporate tunnel because it sees the FQDN. Our external users are now free from needing to append anything to their survey URLs.